PaddlingPadre

Our Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman starts off casually enough, even if there is a bit of underlying tension arising from the strangeness of the encounter: a man and a woman, one a Jew the other a Samaritan, speaking at a well at midday. Still, Jesus initiates the conversation rather straightforwardly: Give me a drink. By this question Jesus is getting his foot in the door, and once he’s done that the conversation quickly gets more profound and more theological. If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Jesus says to the woman. By these words, and by the ensuing conversation, Jesus is proclaiming to this woman the good news, proposing to her to the means of her salvation, and in such striking language! Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

These are among those passages in the scriptures that most evocatively capture the promise and the hope that is extended to us in Christ, and so it is hardly any wonder that the woman cries out, as we ourselves may well have done on hearing these words: Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.

But then, the conversation takes a turn. Go call your husband and come back. Prior to this point, the conversation had been either casual or theoretical, but now it reaches it to the heart. At first, of course, the woman is perhaps thinking that Jesus has simply made a false assumption, but when she confesses that she has no husband, and when Jesus then affirms her confessions, adding that she has had five husbands and the man she is currently with is not her husband, the truth of the situation is made plain to her: this man sees her as she is – not according to what others think of her, not according to how she presents herself, but as she truly is, and there are two elements to this.

First, there is the element of confrontation. Jesus has not directed the conversation to this point for the sake of identifying some trivial fact about her in order to convince her of his messianic identity, as if his production of such knowledge was some kind of persuasive magic trick. Rather he has identified her sinfulness, he has directed her attention to that part of her life that is clearly not in accord with what is good and what is righteous. He knows her sins just as she knows them, but in this moment of confrontation, this moment where she is brought face to face with this prophetic declaration of her own sinfulness, there is implicit a call to conversion.

And that call to conversion has its basis in this second fact, which is doubtlessly more fundamental: that Jesus, who has clearly known who this woman is and what she has done from the start, is nevertheless calling her, sinner though she is, to the blessing of eternal life and to the joy of worshiping the Father in Spirit and truth. That is to say: Jesus knows who this woman is, he knows what she has done, he knows all the circumstances and excuses and justifications that led to her sin, and without excusing her, and yet also without condemning her, he invites her to share in the New Covenant which he will soon establish by the shedding of his blood.

And this leaves the Samaritan woman at precisely that same place where all of us are inevitably left when we are faced with that life that is proposed to us by the gospel. Because the gospel is not a theory, it is not something that can be held at arm’s reach, but rather it confronts us, just as the Samaritan woman was confronted. Because that life that is held out to us is not a life that can be had together with sin. This is the basis of that ancient distinction that the Church has always maintained: that there are two ways set before us, the way of life and the way of death, and a great difference between the two ways. And so, while God in his love for us has offered for us this way of life, to walk in it requires conversion, it requires this confrontation such as we encounter here in scripture, a confrontation by which we are brought face to face with our own sinfulness so that we might, with God’s help, overcome it.

In this moment, this pivotal moment, there are three ways that things can go. The first is that, in being confronted with one’s sinfulness, one can balk and walk away. It is not an easy thing to be faced with one’s failures and shortcomings, and so it is easy enough to understand how one might prefer to turn one’s back on Christ. Such a course can be undertaken more or less explicitly – sometimes one rejects the faith because of an explicit rejection of Christian morals, while at other times one might ostensibly offer other reasons. Still, whenever one rejects Christ, and especially if this is done with a preference towards a lax moral system, such as that which pervades the secular west, it is hard to believe that the true reasons, even if unrecognized, for this rejection are not at their base a preference for this moral laxity over the rigors of ardently striving against sin. Of course, if that is the bargain that you make, to choose sin over virtue, and even to call evil good, what is evil never actually becomes good, and the end of such a one is much to be pitied, both in this life and in the next.

And so, plainly enough, we shouldn’t reject Christ because he confronts us with our sins, but neither should fall into that related trap by which, while ostensibly being Catholic and Christian, we nevertheless act as if our sinfulness were not there, telling ourselves that we are basically good people, that we don’t do anything that’s really all that bad, and that if that we don’t murder anyone we’re doing basically good enough. This is just another form of running from Christ, and I think it is most evident in a bad confession. Now I have no idea who comes to me for confession, and I never remember particular confessions, so I’m not picking on anyone, but one of the worst things to hear in the confessional is when someone says that they can’t really think of any sins, especially if they haven’t been to confession in a long time, because what that says is that are not really examining their lives, that they aren’t really allowing Christ to challenge them and thereby heal them in those areas where they are still weak, and so they go about like sick persons who refuse to see a doctor.

The alternative to both of these ways of running from Christ is, of course, to do as the Samaritan woman does, to accept the truth of our situation, that we are sinners in need of conversion, and then, with God’s help, to strive for greater perfection. This is an attitude most evident in a good confession, when a person confesses their sins simply and humbly, without omission or excuse, but also without despair, filled with hope in the power of God’s grace to triumph over our sins. That is way of conversion. That is the way that leads to the everlasting waters, the way that leads to everlasting life.